Dr. Suresh Subramaniam has received a three-year $368,000 National Science Foundation grant for the project “Resilience in Next-Generation Intelligent Optical Networks.” The world’s telecom infrastructure is dominated by fiber optics because of optical fiber’s tremendous bandwidth, and huge investments continue to be made in that infrastructure. However, as the insatiable demand for bandwidth grows, the network becomes more and more complex and harder to manage and protect. Network designers are, therefore, increasingly turning toward “disaggregated” optical nodes, which are composed of simple building blocks of essential functions. This project aims to equip the network infrastructure with resilience against failures, both small-scale, due to component or system degradation, and large-scale, due to disasters, for example. Resilience schemes at multiple granularity levels, ranging from component-level to network-level to service-level, will be developed. This research is a joint project between Dr. Subramaniam and collaborators from Nagoya University and Kagawa University in Japan, who will be funded separately by NICT, Japan's research and funding agency for telecom research.